There Weren't Any Spider Webs: The Atkinsons, #5

By K. Toppell

Fred Trellis went home to Laconia, New Hampshire to meet with childhood friends, but found a dead man. Fred almost became the next victim. His daughter Carolyn and husband, Henry Atkinson came to help, and found that an eighty-year-old photograph was the  key to the present evil.  

• Language: English
• Publisher: Printabilities, LLC
• Release date: Feb 2, 2018
• ISBN: 9780999375532

K. Toppell

Dr. Toppell graduated from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill in 1963 with a degree in History and Political Science and from Emory University School of Medicine in 1968. He then enjoyed 48 years of practice in Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine in Houston, Tx. with some time out for lectures in American History.  He now lives in Plano, Tx. where he reads, writes and enjoys life with his wife of fifty-one years.      

Book preview

Chapter One

The garage was freestanding , behind a long-abandoned home on grounds that were slowly being reclaimed by brush and scrub trees. For years, the house hadn’t been used except to scare children. It sat back from a lake that was a popular fishing spot.

Tom Robinson hung from a rope passed over a curved screw hook flush with the ceiling of the garage. His eyes were taped shut. There was a gag in his mouth. His arms were shackled behind his back, and his legs were tied at the ankle. Life had long since left his body. Decomposition was underway. Exposed areas of skin were turning black. Flies and maggots, intestinal bacteria, and auto-digestion were rapidly consuming what had once been a vital, living being. The smell was overwhelming.

It was the rancid odor that finally got someone to investigate. Unfortunately, it was a couple of men who simply couldn’t stand it any longer. Once the garage door was opened, they ran, interrupted only by vomiting. They made it back to their motorboat and got as far as they could to lose the stench. They called the sheriff’s department from the middle of the lake. They weren’t going back there.

Deputies arrived about fifteen minutes later. Their reaction was almost the same, but they had to wait for the pathologist, criminalist, sketch preparer, photographer, evidence recorder and custodian, an ambulance, and backup. Only the hanging man knew who had done this and he wasn’t talking.

Chapter Two

Marian Garçon left the bookstore early to walk through town and enjoy spring. Her husband, Shelley, was in the adjacent coffee shop and could handle any problem that might arise. They owned both stores and had wonderful employees, allowing her to play hooky when the mood overcame her.

There was a lovely secondhand store about two blocks away. More like a junk store, really. To Marian, it was a treasure trove of old lamps and books. A section of the bookstore was devoted to some of her finds from there. It’s where she’d found all six volumes of Mark Sullivan’s Our Times, a history of the United States from 1900 to 1925 based on newspaper accounts. She also had General Pershing’s memoirs of WWI.

This particular day, she was out as much for the walk as for the thrill of the hunt. She did find some old magazines, but those were just for leafing through. The only book that she was interested in had pages missing. When she put it back on the shelf, a photo fell out. It was old, a black-and-white, only 2 x 3. On the back, someone had written 1936. Two men, lying on a roof, arms intertwined. The older man shirtless. Both men grinning, wearing the high-waisted pants of the day. An ancient basketball at their feet.

Who were they? Were they related? Were they gay? Would either man be alive today?

Marian was fascinated by old photographs. They told stories, but this one was a mystery to her. She kept the picture.

Shelley saw the photo on the kitchen table when he got home. Another couple of rogues for your crime wall? They don’t look fearsome enough.

Oh, be quiet. The next rogue for that wall will be you, if you don’t watch out. Marian threw a dishtowel at him. I’ve got pretty bad ones. Remember that string of sunfish you caught. One of them was almost two and a half inches long.

That’s not fair. Those were the fish Henry caught. That was the best catch he ever had.

Now you’re being cruel. Maybe I can still find that picture.

No. I sent it and the negative to Carolyn. I wanted her to know how much better Henry was getting at fishing.

Anyway, I found that little picture at the secondhand shop today. It fell out of a book I was looking at. No identification on the photo or in the book. Just the year, 1936, on the back. It just caught my interest.

Shelley was looking at it a bit more closely. Well, the clothes peg it in the thirties. Even their haircuts look it. He looked up at her. Think they’re gay?

I don’t know. It certainly suggests they could be. But it just was a curious little picture. Marian put it in her pocket and went back to making dinner.

They were an interesting couple. Shelley was a former hit man and Marian, a former courtesan. They had both done quite well and retired to Nashua, to the bookstore and coffee shop. They were always curious, however. They were always very curious.

Chapter Three

Sue Fischer owned a small store just north of Laconia, New Hampshire, on Shore Drive. It was the best place to get provisions for fishing on Lake Winnisquam. She knew all the regulars. Before her husband died, they used to go out on the lake often. Now, she stayed on land, ran the store, heard the tall tales, and kept plenty of cold beer available.

It was a couple of guys who grew up in the area that found the body. Freddy and JJ used to fish every day they could. Always together. Then Freddy moved out of state. JJ went to college in New Hampshire, but he didn’t come home often, to visit or to fish. Not until the day they found that hanging man.

Sue had heard that Freddy’s wife had died and JJ was divorced. They came back to the lake for a day of fishing and terror. That’s how the news about the body on the other side of the lake, at the house on Black Brook Road, got out. Freddy and JJ had rented their kit from her. When they came back, they told her and everyone else in the store what they’d found.

Sue remembered when that house was full of life, before everyone left and it began to rot. She was a little girl then. No one ever bought it; she didn’t think it was ever up for sale. Something terrible must have taken place there .

The hanging man was in a class by himself. The medical examiner said the body had been dead about ten days. Getting fingerprints in this case was awful work. They were there; they were attainable, if the skin itself didn’t slip off. One of the pathologists had to assist the senior technician. No one else was able to get close enough and stay steady enough to press the fingertips to the cardboard chart. Still, identification would be withheld from the media until family could be notified.

They were able to get seven reasonably impressions. These were sent to the state and from there to the Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System, a national database maintained by the FBI. IAFIS was huge: seventy million criminal prints and thirty million civil prints received as a result of employer or state mandates. That left over two hundred million people whose fingerprints were not on file.

Mark Dawson, the lead detective on the case, couldn’t wait for IAFIS. He started on the ground. Cops were searching a grid around the house. Others were spread out along the shore, talking to homeowners and vacation renters. He posted a uniformed cop in Sue Fischer’s shop, talking to anyone who had been fishing over the previous two weeks. No one knew anything.

MARIAN GARÇON WENT up to the offices of The Nashua Telegraph. She wanted to look through back issues from the mid-thirties. The morgue was not open to the public, but the editor was an old friend from the bookstore.

He looked over the picture as he walked Marian to the microfiche machine. I wonder if somebody was trying to hide the photo, or was it being used as a bookmark and simply forgotten. Wonder why they didn’t simply tear the picture up? Why hide it in an old book?

Shelley and I couldn’t figure that one out. Thought I would look through some of these old newspapers and see if I can find anyone who looks like either one of them.

Over the next hour, Marian didn’t find any matching images, but at least four men were possibles. She wrote down their names and went on back to the bookstore. One of the possible matches turned out to be a famous WWII photographer, the first one allowed into Hiroshima and Nagasaki. After the war, he set up a photographic lab that was called on to analyze the Zapruder film of the JFK assassination. The second was a former mayor of Nashua. The third had been arrested for stealing cars. The last was a wealthy young man from northern New Hampshire who was killed at the Anzio beachhead in Italy.

Interesting stuff, but not much help in determining who the men in the photo were. They were all dead now anyway, but it still fascinated Marian.

Chapter Four

Almost two weeks after the discovery of the body hanging in the garage behind the house on Black Brook Road, Tom Robinson’s name was released to the media. The authorities had not been able to locate any family members. A search of county records found that the owners of the house were listed as George and Regina Jaysion. No one could find any recent record of them in New Hampshire, or anywhere else for that matter.

Sue Fischer knew them or knew the names, at least. She called Detective Dawson. He arrived in early afternoon, went for the drinks cooler and grabbed a beer.

What you got for me, Sue?

Thanks for coming over, Mark. It’s about the Jaysion house. My family knew the owners pretty well. I didn’t know them much—their kids were all grown when I was little—but they seemed to be a regular family Apparently, everything was normal until a Fourth of July party they held there. Something happened, and they all left within days. That house has been empty ever since.

She and Dawson were sitting on the front porch. He took another swig from the bottle and asked, When did you start importing this stuff, Sue?

Importing? You lunkhead, that’s Shiner Beer. It’s made in Texas.

That’s what I mean. It’s an import. He finished the bottle. You think that empty house had something to do with the dead body in the garage?

Don’t know. It seemed odd to me, that’s all. The house was abandoned mysteriously, and now this. As far as anyone around here knows, until this murder nothing has gone on over there since the Jaysions left.

Carolyn Atkinson picked up the phone. She and her husband, Henry, still had a landline.

Hey, girlfriend. How are you?

Marian laughed. We’re OK. Just need some Cayuga Lake fishing. Anything left down there for us?

Well, Daddy says his goal is to leave only sunfish for Henry, but I think there are a few trout still there. When are you coming?

Next week, if that’s OK with you. I finished inventory at the store, so we’re closing for a long weekend.

"Come on down. I think we have